


White For Forgiveness

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2806193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after the finale. For my h/c bingo "hallucinations" square.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White For Forgiveness

The first rose appears while Sara is at lunch.

She's lunching by herself in her favorite Indian restaurant. It's within walking distance of her office at the London branch of Sterling Bosch, and she's made a habit of eating here once or twice a week, even if she doesn't have a business meeting. It's her way of stopping herself from becoming the workaholic she knows she could be, living at the office and eating at her desk, leaving at nine to shower and crash, coming to work at six the next morning. At least this way she gets out of the office and sees the sun once in awhile ... well, what sun the gray winter skies of England can muster for her, anyway.

She gets up to go to the W.C. -- after two years in London, she's finally stopped calling it the "bathroom" -- and when she comes back, there's something new on her table: a bud vase containing a single white rose, sitting next to her half-finished chicken tikka masala.

How sweet, she thinks. She's on first-name terms with the family that runs the business, and she wonders if it's a special occasion for them, or if it's some sort of anniversary of the first time she ate here that she's completely forgotten about.

She leaves an extra-large tip on the table. On her way out, she notices Amrit, the owner's eldest son, refilling water glasses. "Thank you so much!" she tells him, and he smiles politely, but looks a little puzzled.

She'll think back on that later, and sometimes she'll wonder if the rose was ever really there at all.

***

A week later, there's a tap on her office door. It's her administrative assistant, Miriam. "Miss Ellis, Paul from the downstairs desk just brought these up for you."

"This" is a small bud vase with two roses in it, one white, one yellow. There's no card. "Who is it from?" Sara asks.

"I don't know. Paul said a local florist delivered them for you."

"No message?" she asks.

"Not that I'm aware of."

She has Sterling Bosch's in-house lab check the flowers just in case they're not from a secret admirer so much as a secret enemy. They check out perfectly -- there is not a booby-trap to be found in flower nor water nor vase. Sara puts them on her windowsill and, out of curiosity, looks up rose color symbolism.

Yellow roses, it seems, denote friendship and affection. White roses are symbols of purity, humility, and new beginnings.

On her lunch break, she stops by Paul's desk and asks him about the florist. No, he doesn't remember which florist, just that the delivery driver wore a green uniform and sunglasses. No one in the front office seems to remember much about the driver at all, or any identifying logos on his uniform. The downstairs security cameras didn't catch him because he happened to come in behind a parcel delivery driver with arms heaped high, concealing him, and after that he never came in range of the cameras.

Something in Sara's heart trips over. She stares and stares at the grainy footage, trying to see familiarity in the blur of an elbow, the flash of a half-glimpsed leg.

There's one person she knows who would do this. One person who would _undoubtedly_ do this. But that person has been dead for almost a year.

***

Now she's waiting, anticipating, and her secret admirer or possibly stalker does not disappoint. A few days later there's a pink rose tucked under her windshield wiper (windscreen wiper, she reminds herself). She googles quickly on her phone. Pink roses: appreciation, joy, happiness.

She whips out her trusty fingerprint kit -- she keeps it in her purse, as any well-prepared lady should -- and dusts the wipers and windscreen. The only prints she finds are her own. 

She puts the rose in a mug in her office and sends an email to Peter Burke.

She hasn't seen Peter since Neal's funeral. Then, he was a crumpled shadow of the tall, confident man she remembers, gray-faced and lost in his own private grief. Since then, they've emailed back and forth a few times. He sent her a birth announcement when Neal Robert Burke was born, along with a picture of a crumpled red baby that looks exactly like every other newborn baby Sara's ever had the regrettable experience of viewing. Elizabeth emailed her some more baby pictures a little later, but that's the last contact she's had with either Burke.

"I see him sometimes," Peter confessed to her after the graveside service. They were walking quietly between the headstones, her impractical high-heeled shoes wobbling on the grass. "Just flashes out of the corner of my eye. I haven't told El. She's got enough on her mind with -- with the baby and all of that. I have to hold it together for her, you know?" He tried to laugh; it came out twisted and wrong. "Can't have her thinking the old man's falling apart."

_But who holds you together?_ she wondered, as he put his hand on her elbow to steady her when her ankle tried to twist, again, on a patch of uneven ground. She'd never seen Peter look _old_ before. "I do too," she admitted. She hadn't told anyone that -- didn't have anyone in London to talk to about that sort of thing, really. "On the Underground, or in crowds -- and I know he's not ... I mean, I know he wouldn't be in London, in any case. It's like you said, just flashes. Someone the right height and build, wearing the right kind of hat."

"I used to tease him about that hat," Peter said. "He'd do that little hat-flip thing just to annoy me. Now I think -- I'd give anything if --" He stopped talking, stopped walking, and brought up a hand to cover his face.

Sara just stood there. She had no idea what to do. She hardly knew how to deal with her own emotions, let alone someone else's. Finally she sat down on the grass, pulling him down with her, and they sat there for a long time, under the shade of an old oak tree with its gnarled branches sweeping low over the headstones.

Now, sitting with her hands on the keys, she isn't quite sure how to ask what she wants to ask. She doesn't want to rip the bandage off a wound that might only now be starting to heal. For her own part, she's not sure _what_ she's feeling. Her pain has scabbed over, one more loss in a lifetime of them. She can't say why she's so sure of the thing she knows, except she is.

Finally she types a brief email of trivial news from her life, ending with, "How are you and Elizabeth? Has anything interesting happened lately?"

She stares at that, touches her fingers to the keys, aches to ask the question she wants to ask. _Have you seen anything recently that reminds you of Neal? Do you have any reason to believe he's alive?_

In the end, thinking of Peter's face at the funeral, of the broken slump of his shoulders, she simply can't ask. Not directly. He'll have to bring it up.

She sends the message. A few seconds later, she gets an out-of-office bounceback. Apparently Peter is on vacation from the FBI. Well, that figures.

Sara leans back in her chair and contemplates the roses in their vases, one mismatched vase on each end of her office windowsill. The white and yellow ones are starting to wither, but she can't bring herself to throw them away.

The wheels in her head are starting to spin. This is a mystery. Sara likes mysteries.

"If it were me, I think I'd be calling the police," Miriam remarks, noting the new flower when she comes in to bring Sara her morning reports.

"Trust me," Sara says absently, gazing at the flowers, "I'm calling my building security company this morning to get an upgrade. Although, if it's who I think it is, it might not help."

"Ex-boyfriend?" Miriam asks, looking concerned.

"It's not quite like that."

She takes a photo of the bud vase with her phone and runs it through Google Image Search, looking for someplace that sells vases like that. It's a fairly standard vase type, but there's a tiny maker's mark on the bottom. This is, after all, what Sara does for a living, and soon she's got it traced to a glassware company in France. They have branches in Marseilles and Paris.

She takes a deep, shuddering breath. Her hand trembles, just a little, on the keyboard.

Then she does something she's almost never done, and takes the rest of the day off. She's got more than enough leave time; she almost never takes personal or vacation days.

She gets in her car and just drives. Drives and drives. She stops on a hill somewhere -- she doesn't even know where, except there's a lot of rolling hills and meadows dotted with sheep. The wind is cold and the sky threatens rain. She leans against her car and pulls up the last email she ever got from Neal.

It was sent a few weeks before his death. It's chatty and cheerful, as his emails always were. There's a selfie he took with a clearly annoyed-looking Agent Jones, who's trying to do paperwork while Neal leans on him.

It's only by way of other people that Sara knows anything about the unhappy events that took place since she left New York: the search for James, Peter's arrest, Neal's kidnapping. Neal never talked to her about any of that. He sent her perky, playful emails filled with trivial details -- _Today I stole Peter's favorite coffee mug. I keep moving it around because he knows I took it but can't figure out where I put it. It's driving him crazy. Right now it's in the cabinet above the coffee maker behind all the other mugs. I think I'll move it again soon._ About the bigger things, about his hopes and dreams, his fears and regrets, he was always silent.

"Is this all we were, Caffrey?" she says quietly to the cool November countryside, paging through emails with subjects like _The Tale of the Mug: Chapter 4_ and _Mozzie + brandy = comedy gold_. "A dream of a love affair -- an illusion like the ghosts of you that I still see when I turn around too quickly in a crowd?"

_Was it just a nice roll between the sheets and a walk in the clouds? Did you give anything of yourself to me? Did I take anything of you to England with me?_

He always made her laugh, though. Even rereading his emails, she smiles. When was the last time she laughed, really laughed? She can't even remember.

She's got one of his emails open anyway. Before she can lose her nerve, she hits "reply" and types a quick message to an address she's neither sent to nor received from in over a year. _Are you here?_ she writes, and sends it.

She feels silly as soon as the email is gone. She's emailing a ghost. There's probably an ordinary (and quite possibly worrisome) explanation for the roses: a client, maybe, or one of the handful of men that she's dated briefly since she's been in London.

But still.

White is for new beginnings.

On her way home, she stops in at a florist and purchases two roses, one white and one yellow. She contemplates red -- red for love and passion, the little information card beside the florist's display of roses informs her -- but no, not that. Not yet. Maybe never. But yellow for friendship, white for starting over ... yes, that's all right, maybe.

She thinks about where to leave them. The car isn't right; neither is the office. Finally she takes them up to her flat with her. She finds a bright red ribbon and goes out onto the balcony, and ties them to the railing. The ribbon is a splash of color on the gray early-winter day. Anyone who looks up, who knows which window is hers, could not possibly fail to notice them.

She's heading back inside, kicking off her shoes, when her phone rings. There's a wild part of her that thinks _Neal?_ .... but no, the caller ID reads "Burke Premiere Events". That's interesting too. She can't remember the last time Elizabeth called her.

"Elizabeth?" she says, phone tucked into the crook of her neck while she pours herself a glass of wine. "Long time, no talk. How are you and Peter? And the baby," she remembers to add belatedly.

"Sara. Hi. We're fine, how are you?" Elizabeth sounds a little out of breath, and uncharacteristically for her, doesn't even wait for a response before going on. "Sara, listen, I just got off the phone with Peter. You'll never believe where he is -- oh, I don't know how to begin, and I'm probably not the one who should be telling you this, but I know him and I didn't think _he'd_ think to call you, and -- Sara, are you sitting down?"

And Sara doesn't remember the last time she laughed, but now, on this cool gray day with winter rain threatening, she laughs and laughs and laughs.


End file.
